Under a Yellow Sky
by WhenasInSilks
Summary: Temporarily on HIATUS. Gin n' Tonic. When Harry Potter walked into the Forbidden Forest on the night of the Battle of Hogwarts, there were two souls in his body. When he re-emerged, there was just one. No one thought to ask which one. Canon compliant until Battle of Hogwarts. Starring: Hero!Ginny. Ginny Weasley is nobody's victim.
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1**

* * *

It was dark under the earth. Dark, and cold, and in the first moment of her arrival, the feeling that flared to life in her chest was not the familiar fire of her Gryffindor courage, but something rather like panic.

A moment only, and then she heard the _pop_ of apparition (the sound strangely distorted by the charmed bubble of air surrounding her head), followed by Luna's murmured incantation, and the shower of witchlights that scattered across the stone ceiling put paid both to the darkness and that sudden, animal terror.

Ginny smiled at Luna, and, with a touch of wariness, at her companion, and held up a finger: _Wait_. Fumbling in her pocket, she produced a muggle matchbook. A conjured flame could sustain itself on the magic of the caster, but nonmagical fire required oxygen. It had been Severus who had performed this test on their last visit, and at the time, his seeming over-caution had irritated her. Now, she found herself grateful to him for establishing a protocol. Protocol, Luna had once remarked in one of her sporadic and unsettling flashes of insight, was a ritual like any other. Performed correctly, it summoned the illusion of control.

She struck the match. It flared in the darkness. Ginny counted the beats – one, two, three – then dropped the stick and ground it underfoot. A flick of her wrist released her wand from its holster. "You can drop your bubbles," she told the others, dispelling her own with a wave of her wand. "Air freshening charm still works."

So that was two immediate priorities—light and air—taken care of, but it was still bloody cold. She considered asking Luna or Blaise to cast a warming spell—the three of them had decided beforehand that she should perform no non-essential magic in order to keep her reserves as high as possible. Luna, bless her, didn't appear to have noticed the cold, and was peering interestedly around the chamber for all the world as if she hadn't spent two bloody years of her life designing and constructing it. And Blaise was probably used to freezing underground chambers, having lived seven years of his life in the Slytherin dormitory, and Ginny was unsure enough of him not to want show any weakness…

( _What would Harry do?_ whispered a little voice at the back of her head.)

…which was _silly_ , because she was the leader and leaders took action. "Bit nippy down here, isn't it?" she said briskly. "Blaise, d'you mind?"

He complied with a lazy wave of his wand, his face its usual politely unreadable mask. A wave of warmth spread throughout the room.

"Oooh, good thinking!" said Luna. "Heat helps scare off frigiderious glibbons."

"Yeah," Ginny said. "My thoughts exactly." She clapped her hands together (and grimaced inwardly—that was one of her mother's mannerisms). "So, we all clear on the plan then?" What she meant was, _Is there anything we haven't thought of? Have we left any possible loopholes?_ What she meant was, _Isn't there any other way?_

"Oh, I should say so," said Luna, who was engaged in coaxing one of the little balls of witchlight down from the ceiling.

Blaise simply inclined his head, a single raised brow indicative of polite incredulity.

She smiled wryly and slouched against the wall, running a hand through her hair. "Humour me."

"We wait one hour exactly," Luna recited. "Then we put up our shields. Another half hour, and we evacuate." She said the last word slowly, savouring each syllable. One of the witchlights was circling her brow, and another came to rest an inch or so above her outspread hand. Dreamily, she began to turn in place, hand still outstretched, the lights matching pace.

"And when you reach the surface?" Ginny pushed.

Blaise's shoulders lifted and he exhaled in the merest suggestion of a sigh. He had been the one to push for a contingency plan in the first place—"It's redundant," she had argued, and he had shrugged and said, "Better redundant than dead," sounding so much like Severus that it _hurt_ —but that didn't mean the final plan had been to his liking. "We collapse the chamber and contact Granger," he said.

 _("But why_ Granger _?" he had demanded. It was the most expressive she had ever seen him._

" _Can you think of anyone—_ anyone _—in the world with more experience?" she'd replied, hotly._

 _He'd opened his mouth, but Luna had beat him to it. "It's you!" she'd said to Ginny, sounding pleased, as if she'd worked out the solution to a puzzle. "Just you," and then she'd turned her smile on Blaise, who had shut his mouth and leant back in his chair._

 _And Ginny had never formulated it that way before, not even to herself, but it was true, and she thought of how badly the world had gone wrong that it_ was _true. "Yeah," she'd said. "And a fat lot of good that'll do if I'm dead." And didn't say,_ Or worse. _)_

"We know our parts," Blaise said in the here-and-now, and gave her a half smile. "Try not to fret too much." He flicked his wand, and sank languidly into the sofa which had materialised behind him.

 _That_ made her grin. "I'll just leave you two to sort the interior decorating then."

"We've been awfully negligent," piped up Luna, pausing in a wobbly arabesque, globes of pale fire orbiting her outstretched fingers and toes. "It's a blessing we haven't already been infested with burrowing tundrils, but we really haven't a moment to lose. I'm sure Blaise won't mind helping with the ritual purification."

The witchlights darted back up to the ceiling as she dropped to the floor and began rummaging in her satchel. After a moment, she produced a battered and somewhat elderly garland. The flowers were an eye-watering green and appeared to be buzzing faintly. Blaise's eyes widened, but he accepted the garland with unexpected gravity.

Ginny opened her mouth, and shut it, remembering what Luna had said about protocol and rituals. Even if those rituals involved removing one's shoes and filling them with—was that custard? Surely not.

"Go on, Weasley," Blaise said, almost kindly. "Do the hero thing."

Perhaps it _was_ custard after all (and now was _not_ the time to wonder how exactly Luna had violated the first Principal Exception to Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration) because Luna had run a finger under her wand and was now sucking on it with a thoughtful expression. She removed the finger with a startling _pop_.

And strangely enough it was that _pop_ that jolted her into action. "Right," Ginny said, and didn't say "see you later" in case it was a lie, and didn't say "goodbye" in case she never said it again. She turned to the wall she had been resolutely ignoring, to the door that only she could see.

And just like that, all of her carefully cultivated detachment seemed to drain away. The rest of the chamber slid out of focus, Luna's dreamily didactic voice sinking beneath a gentle roaring like the sea. And waiting for her in the pit of her stomach was dread, cold and heavy and sickening.

She squeezed her eyes shut. _What would Harry do?_

She remembered Harry at the Battle of Hogwarts, heading alone into the forest, and she remembered what he had met there, and yes, there was that old grief rising up to meet her, and that awful, mindless fear. But then, greater than either of those came anger, and she let it grow until it filled her, until it burned away grief and fear and left only purpose.

Ginny opened her eyes. She strode forward, opened the door, and stepped into the chamber beyond.

* * *

They didn't watch her go.

Blaise knew enough about the Fidelius Charm to know what it would look like as she crossed the threshold into the second chamber. She'd simply seem to disappear—nothing fancy, just one minute there, and the next minute gone. And she _would_ be gone, entirely gone, unreachable, until—if—she crossed that threshold again.

Blaise was a Slytherin and no fool, so naturally he'd thought about that _if_ and all its angles: if she came back, if she _didn't_ come back. If she came back … wrong. He'd made and carried through plans for everything that came before the _if_. He'd made plans for everything after, and then he'd thought and planned some more, meticulously mapping out each branching possibility until he was half mad with the planning. But that _if_ , perhaps the most significant of his life, that moment of uncertainty between her crossing the threshold and whatever followed—that was out of his control. He'd placed any control he might have had in the hands of a Gryffindor girl almost two years his junior (and a blood traitor to boot) and he was almost sure he had been right to do so. But that didn't mean he had to watch her as she walked away with it.

Luna, too, kept her eyes downcast, apparently absorbed by her task. She filled her left trainer and moved on to her right. Several minutes passed in silence.

"Lovegood," Blaise said.

Luna gave a little start and blinked up at him. He inclined his head towards her wandhand. Her gaze refocused on her wand, which had slipped in her grip and was now forming a glistening heap against one of the legs of the sofa. A whispered _finite_ stopped the flow, and another wave of her wand banished the heap.

Another minute passed. And another.

"I don't suppose you _were_ violating the first Principal Exception to Gamp's Law of Elementary Transfiguration?" Blaise said, his tone one of casual enquiry.

She shook her head. "I was summoning it," she explained. "From my larder."

Blaise looked at the mass filling her shoes—and half as much again had spilled onto the couch—at a rough estimate, she had produced at least a litre and a half of custard. He raised his eyebrows. "You came prepared."

"No, not really." Luna tilted her head back towards the ceiling, overlarge earrings bobbing. "I just like custard."

And what, thought Blaise, could one possibly say to that.

A pause.

"She'll be alright," she told the ceiling, and Blaise didn't know if she was asking for reassurance, or giving it.

He thought of lying. Instead—

"She might not be," he said. And found, to his irritation, that he was half hoping that she would argue.

"No, she mightn't," Luna agreed. She tilted her head down again and fixed those too-large, too-protuberant eyes on him. "But we planned for days. We thought of every possibility, laid down every course of action." She took a breath. "And she's the bravest of us and the most powerful and she has the most fighting experience and she _knows_ him, all the hims, _every_ him, and she survived, and then she took him _down_. And we did do an awfully good job building this prison." And then, much more softly. "And she _has_ to pull it off. So."

 _And if she doesn't?_ He bit back the question on his tongue. He knew the answer.

"So what comes next?" he said instead. "With the—" he made a gesture encompassing his vibrating crown and Luna's pudding filled trainers.

"Oh." Her brow furrowed. "Do you know, I'm not sure? I was mostly just making it up."

"You were—" he stopped, at a loss for words.

She gave him a look, half stern, half pitying. "You never get burrowing tundrils this far north."

He held her gaze for a moment. Then he sank his head into his hands and laughed until he was near sobbing with it. As his last chokes of laughter died, she pulled out a handkerchief and handed it to him, silently, without looking at him. He wiped the tears from his eyes and hands, and looked down at the square of cloth. It was tartan, in what might have been Ravenclaw colours, although he had never before seen Ravenclaw associated with such a lurid shade of blue.

Silently, he cleaned up the evidence of his lapse, folded the handkerchief, and handed it back down to her. She took it, again without looking.

In a carefully offhand voice, he asked, "Are you comfortable down there?"

"Quite comfortable, thank you, Blaise." But after a moment, she scooted backwards until she was leaning against the base of the couch. She began to hum quietly to herself, her posture relaxed, head tilted slightly to one side. Her wand never left her hand.

They waited.

* * *

A/N: Fear not, my ducklings! All questions shall be answered in time (some sooner than others). But feel free to ask them anyway!

I haven't written fanfic since I was 13 which was a _goodly_ while ago, so please forgive any overwriting, inconsistencies in character or tone, etc. I barely know what I'm doing. This is gonna be a BIG story (in terms of stakes, and probably also in terms of length) because I can't see G &T coming together except in extremis. At least, not without it being super horrifying and abusive. We're aiming for only moderately horrifying here, folks.

In terms of updates, I've chapter 2 mostly written and am piecing together chapter 3. I'm mostly writing for my own (capricious) entertainment at the moment, but if there's actually any interest in the story, that'd definitely be motivation to keep going with it. Like, I'm posting this chapter when I probably should be spending more time editing it just to see if it's worth continuing. So like, if you want to read more, you have the power to make that happen! All you have to do is review!

This is T for now, but I definitely expect to upgrade it to M. For language at the very least, and probably for more exciting things after. So fair warning.


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: Promised I'd answer some questions, didn't I? This chapter tells 'where' and 'who.' 'How' and 'why' will be answered in chapters 3 and 4 respectively. So if you're wondering what the heck is going on, don't worry, we're getting there.

Sorry for the long delay in posting. My muse decided to switch fandoms (oh hai _Labyrinth_ ) within maybe a week of posting the first chapter. At about the same time I realised I'd bitten off a bit (read: "a lot") more than I could chew with this story, given the plot trajectory and the world-building it requires (which is LOTS the stakes are SO HIGH). Think of _Tithe_ as training in becoming a good enough storyteller and a good enough world builder to write this fic. Which is to say, I am still thinking about/working on/excited about this story (it is NOT abandoned) but it will be updated _extremely infrequently_ (and possibly not at all) until _Tithe_ is finished and I can give _Yellow Sky_ the attention it deserves. So, in short this story is STILL ON HIATUS, and any and all updates until _Tithe_ is finished will be the exception rather than the rule.

The story is unbeta-ed and will continue to be so until I can devote my full attention to it, so apologies for any and all mistakes.

Several reviewers (and thank you for reviewing you lovely humans) have expressed concerns about the Ginny/Tom dynamic and the fundamental squick therein, to which I can only say _I know_. I get where you're coming from, and this story is not coming from a place of "oh, that squick is okay," or worse, "that squick is sexy." It's coming from a place of "Wow, Ginny, what a character, isn't she great, who is equally fascinating?" and "Wow, TMR is the worst but also such a fascinating character but I've read every Tomione in existence and isn't it time for a change" and "oh, I guess they have a history together, don't they. _Hmmm_." Which is not to dismiss your squick—I mean, go with your comfort levels and if this story is beyond them, it's cool. Just know that I am fully cognizant of and sympathetic with your concerns.

* * *

 **Chapter 2**

* * *

The prison was a piece of functional brilliance. It made, not to put too fine a point on it, Nuremgard look about as secure as her Dad's garden shed, a comment which at the time had elicited a sneering aside from Severus Snape about "Gryffindors" and "hubris." But even he had been unable to find a real flaw in the final scheme: two sealed-off chambers deep underground, made habitable by Continuous Air-Freshening Charms and connected by a single door. The second chamber under an Anti-Disapparition jinx, so the only method of access was by Apparating into the first chamber. Each chamber under a separate Fidelius, with a separate Secret Keeper. Only four people in the world had been privy to the location of the first chamber: Luna, of course, being its Secret Keeper; Ginny herself; Severus Snape; and now Blaise Zabini. And Severus Snape was dead. Ginny was the Secret Keeper for the second chamber, and apart from their sleeping beauty—the chamber's sole occupant—she was the only one who could access it. Only two people in all the world had access to that chamber, and of the two, she was the only one who could leave, and she bloody well intended to keep it that way.

It hadn't even taken an Albus Dumbledore to plan it all out, just three clever, desperate people, a few hours of brainstorming, a few minor hexings, and five and a half litres of Gold Roast Doradan coffee. Near perfect security, Severus had explained, was achievable as long as you were willing to sacrifice all flexibility, and they hadn't needed flexibility, they'd needed impregnability. Ginny wondered sometimes how many other chambers like theirs were scattered across the earth, the Secret Keepers long dead and the inhabitants doomed to sleep until the end of the world and its magic. Was that where all those stories of sleeping kings came from? King Arthur and John Uskglass and Owen Glyndŵr? And then she stopped wondering, because torturing yourself with unanswerable questions was for Ravenclaws and masochists and Merlin knew she had enough to be getting on with.

The practical details and the execution had taken much longer—months of labour, with each of them passing out from magical exhaustion at least once. Luckily, you could be one step above a Squib and still play professional Quidditch—all you needed was a spark to make the broom fly, and the rest was athletic skill, and determination, and _brains_ , whatever Severus thought. And no one had known Severus was still alive back then, so he could drain his core to his heart's content, and as for Luna, no one thought much of her anyway.

Months of labour, and months of anxiety. How often over those months had she found herself drawn to the cellar of the Prince family home where their prisoner had been temporarily—well, _stored_ , for lack of a better term? How often had Luna founded her there—perched on a mouldering chair, staring at the slumbering figure, his body shapeless and almost recognisable under all the layers of chains—and taken her by the hand and gently led her away and above ground?

Severus had caught them emerging from the cellar one day. He'd spent the past four hours vanishing stone to hollow out the chambers—they were still constructing the physical prison at that point—and his face was ashen with exhaustion. His lips had thinned at the sight of them, coming up the stairs, one of Luna's fragile, birdlike arms curled around Ginny's shoulders. He'd waited until Luna had disappeared into the kitchen, before rounding on Ginny.

"May I remind you, you stupid girl, that I am the only living Potions Master in the entirety of these British Isles, and that when I brew the Draught of Living Death, you may expect it to have a more lasting effect than a hot bath and a cup of camomile tea!"

Ginny said nothing, plaiting and unplaiting her fingers.

He sneered. "Or perhaps it's not merely my Potions skills, but my competency with warding spells that you doubt? Please, enlighten me: where exactly is it that you find me deficient? I'm eager to reassure you—anything to stop you from skulking around my basement like a dog guarding a bloody bone!"

"Oh for Merlin's sake," she'd snapped, "this isn't about you, Severus. If it were anyone else in that basement… But it's _him_."

And she'd looked him right in the eyes, unflinching, and he'd been the first to turn away. It should have felt like a victory. Instead, it felt like nothing at all.

When at last the prison was finished—she'd never felt relief like that before in her life. Not even after the Chamber of Secrets. Not even after the Battle of Hogwarts. It did not feel like joy. It was something wilder and purer than that, something like the whip of wind in her face and its tangle in her hair, like the smell of dew on dawn grass, like the sound of the ocean. Because she was done, they were done, it was _done_ —no one knew, and no one had guessed, and they were _free_ , and he would rot under the earth until the stars burned out in the sky.

Years later, when they'd realised what they would have to do and started planning their return, she thought she could feel those stars winking out, one by one.

* * *

As Ginny crossed the threshold between the two charms, her senses seemed to scramble—the sound of Luna's voice, as it continued to expound whatever mad, half-believed theory she was currently championing, left a taste of rosemary and spun sugar on her tongue, while the chill of the room ahead of her sent strange gusts of colour swirling across her vision. She shook her head as the synaesthesia faded, and closed the door behind her. She was entirely alone now—no one on (or below) the earth would be able to reach her if something went wrong.

She didn't know what she had expected—feared—but the figure on the table was very clearly asleep, not conscious. Not dead. Point one to Severus. Just to be sure, though, she flicked her wand with a murmured, " _Incarcerous_ ," waiting until he was fully bound to the table before she approached.

He was breathing evenly, seemingly unaffected by the cold or his long imprisonment. She beckoned one of the witch lights closer, examining his fingernails: short, his jawline: barely shadowed with stubble, his hair: black and unruly as ever, but no longer than she remembered. A perfect stasis then. The jagged lines of his scar peeked out from under his fringe. Almost without thinking, she reached out to brush it out aside, and then froze, imagining him stirring at her touch, his eyes snapping open—would they be emerald green, or slit-pupiled and red, or—worst of all—black and liquid and glittering with recognition?

And that was _stupid_ , because there was no way he could wake up without the antidote, she'd made sure of that, and the desire to touch him was even stupider than the fear, because Harry was seven years dead, and this—this _thing_ was his killer.

She pulled the timer necklace out from under her robes, the hourglass pendant bouncing awkwardly against her chest as she bent over to retrieve a small crystal decanter from her satchel. Grabbing his chin roughly in one hand, she pulled his jaw open, pulled the stopper off the bottle, and dumped the contents into his open mouth. Then she dropped the bottle, snatching up her bag and retreating as quickly as she could to the other end of the chamber. Her spare hand rose to squeeze the hourglass. She felt it grow warm under her hand as the sand began to fall.

Five minutes, Severus had said. It might take longer, of course—these things varied—but five minutes was all he could guarantee her, and so it was essential—here he had leaned forward, speaking with all the grim emphasis of one who has spent nearly two decades struggling with the products of adolescent procrastination— _essential_ that she complete every necessary preparation within those five minutes. And he'd made her practice until she thought she might scream with the pointlessness of it all—because none of them had thought, had even _dreamed_ that they'd return here at all, much less for this purpose. Not then.

But now—and this was another point to Severus, the bastard—now the incantations flowed from her tongue with hardly a thought. It helped that most of the enchantments had been set up years before, when they first built the chamber, and needed only to be triggered. Long dormant spells of warding and of warning flickered into life. Three successive rows of bars—one iron, one rowan, and one adamantine—emerged from the ceiling, cutting the chamber in two. She coaxed the witchlights into forming a row on his side of the bars, and then made them blaze with light. This was more than just an intimidation trick, illuminating the captive and casting the captor into shadow—she was far from sure he was capable of being intimidated at all. It was a safeguard against Legilimancy. "Your Occlumancy is … passable," Severus had told her, which meant _excellent_ , and well they both knew it. "But only fools and Gryffindors take unnecessary risks. The Dark Lord is one of the few Legilimens accomplished enough to break into your mind without direct eye contact, but it is far more difficult and far less certain, and blinding him may just give you the edge you need."

Turning to herself, she cast the strongest _Protego_ she could muster. The exertion sent bright spots flaring before her eyes. When her vision cleared, she stooped and slung the satchel back over her shoulders, thinking longingly of the silvery folds of Harry's Invisibility Cloak tucked carefully away inside. "The element of surprise in battle is everything," Severus had cautioned. "Strike once, and strike fast. Don't let him see you coming. But if you find yourself ever needing to _parley_ with him—" Good Godric, was the man a seer? "—you must remember that the Dark Lord is proud. Do not antagonise him without cause." And so the Invisibility Cloak remained in her satchel, a last resort.

Finally, reluctantly, she banished the bonds which tied him to the table. They wouldn't hold him in any case, and as Severus had said, she had no wish to antagonise him. Well, all right, to be perfectly honest she had a spanking great wish, a bloody all-consuming _passion_ to antagonise him, but unfortunately, it would be rather counterproductive in this circumstance. And almost certainly lethal.

There was a strange, echoing chime, and the hourglass pendant grew suddenly cold—almost icy—against her chest. Her five minutes was up.

Something had changed in the cell, some intangible quality that made the still air seem suddenly charged, like the air before a thunderstorm. She thought—what was surely no more than a morbid fancy—she could sense strange tendrils feeling around the room, testing the defences, testing her. She thought she heard his breath catch, saw his eyelids flutter.

She took a step closer.

Even if it all fails, she thought with a certain morbid satisfaction, even if he tortures me, it won't do him any good, because Luna's the Secret Keeper for the only way out, and she can't get in here.

She drew up to the bars, just out of the light, as slowly, so slowly, he sat up on the table. His eyes, as he cast them around the room, were green after all, as she'd known and feared they would be. It hurt only half as much as she'd thought, and _that_ opened a wound, small but deep, the sort of deep-down, never-healing wound that old soldiers use to tell the weather.

She inhaled.

"Hello, Tom."

* * *

A/N: John Uskglass is from my favourite novel of all time, _Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell_. Owen Glyndŵr is a historical figure, but in this context (obviously) a shout out to _The Raven Cycle_.

I think "until the end of the world and its magic" is nicked from HPMOR—there'll be a lot of world-building related stuff in this fic that may be borrowed from or inspired by it, but I'll try to cite it all.

Thanks so much to **Psych0Geek, lightleviosa, PinkRose235, frak-all,** and **ExilEden** for reviewing! Like, honestly, I wasn't planning on updating at all until I was done with _Tithe_ but the reviews got me feeling inspired again.

If you read and enjoyed, please please do drop me a quick word and let me know! This story is very near and dear to my heart and I'd love to know what you think! Are you more or less confused then you were last chapter?


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